Losers Keepers

For The Rumpus, Miriam Fried reflects on living with dementia and how, with the help of her daughter, she constructs stories to explain and cope with the intermittency of her memory. Of all the things Fried’s forgotten, it’s not the big events that she misses remembering most. It’s forgetting the quiet, shared nuances and intimacies that occur between two people who love one another.

But disappearing milestones are only the glitzy headlines of this odd condition I’m in. It hurts more to lose the little things: shared rituals, breakthrough conversations, in-jokes, eccentric anecdotes, all the small-scale knowings that thicken life with context and complication. I wish I remembered the time Tildy and I went to the Yiddish off-Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof, but it’s worse to forget the stray cat who lived by the pier, the one Tildy and I named Clarinet and greeted each time we went down to the water. I know we went to Fiddler because the program is still floating around my apartment. I know we knew that cat because when I tell Tildy I saw a stray by the pier yesterday, she asks me if Clarinet came back. There’s a long silence while I wonder who Clarinet is before Tildy realizes she’ll have to tell me the whole story. These days that’s a common kind of silence.